


and still be a human

by simplyclockwork



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: (not sexually), Aggressive Love Language, Alternate Universe - Dark, Blood, Blood blood and more blood, Bloodplay, Bodily Harm, Corpse Desecration, Corruption, Dark Character, Dark John, Dark Johnlock, Dark Sherlock, Darklock, Darkness, Dehumanizing, Devotion, Falling In Love, Graphic Violence, Gun Violence, John is a Bit Not Good, Johnlock - Freeform, Lots of talk of blood and gore, Love Confessions, M/M, Murder, POV John Watson, Sherlock Holmes Loves John Watson, Sherlock Holmes is a Bit Not Good, They kill other people and love one another?, Unhealthy Relationships, Unsafe Sex, Vague Sex, Violence, Worship, ish?, messed up relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:54:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25577662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyclockwork/pseuds/simplyclockwork
Summary: The corruption of John Watson and Sherlock Holmes.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 31
Kudos: 103





	and still be a human

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Cross Wired](https://archiveofourown.org/works/351941) by [PrettyArbitrary](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyArbitrary/pseuds/PrettyArbitrary). 



> This fic was, in part, inspired by [Cross Wired](https://archiveofourown.org/works/351941) by PrettyArbitrary, as well as by two of [Reapersun's](https://reapersun.tumblr.com/) amazing fan arts:
> 
> [This](https://reapersun.tumblr.com/post/9808059409/if-i-had-known-not-to-carry-on-that-way-it) and [this](https://reapersun.tumblr.com/post/9580439441/image-googling-how-to-suture-a-wound-and-watchin)
> 
> **\----**
> 
> Title from the song [Lateralus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7JG63IuaWs) by Tool
> 
> _feed my will to feel this moment  
>  urging me to cross the line  
> reaching out to embrace the random  
> reaching out to embrace whatever may come_
> 
> _I embrace my desire to  
>  I embrace my desire to  
> feel the rhythm, to feel connected  
> enough to step aside and weep like a widow_
> 
> _to feel inspired  
>  to fathom the power  
> to witness the beauty  
> to bathe in the fountain_
> 
> _to swing on the spiral  
>  to swing on the spiral to  
> swing on the spiral  
> of our divinity_
> 
> **and still be a human**  
> 

His first night with Sherlock Holmes, John kills a man. It feels like playing God, taking life and death in his hands and snuffing it out. Jeff Hope has killed people, but so has John. They are not mirror images, but maybe they are flip-sides of the same coin. Hope isn’t a good man, but he’s still a human being, even one turned toward something dark and cruel by a name shouted through agony: _Moriarty._

The name becomes Sherlock’s obsession, but all John can remember is how it felt to take the shot. To hold fate between his fingers, to weigh the benefit of letting Hope walk away against committing murder.

It was Hope, or it was Sherlock. In the end, it wasn’t even a question. 

John can still feel the power, the kickback absorbed through his steady arms, the smell of gunpowder and gunsmoke in the aftermath. Between aiming and pulling the trigger, there had only been one thought in John’s head. 

He was putting down a rabid dog. Not killing a man, but putting the dog down. The thought follows him long past that night. It becomes a mantra, a prayer, a recitation in the dark when sleep fails. 

_Putting down the dog. Putting down the dog._

* * *

The alley is narrow, dank, damp, and a man lunges at Sherlock with murder in his eyes. A bullet from John’s gun erases the look and half of the man’s face. 

Standing over the body, watching blood pool and blend and soak into the filthy concrete under his feet, John hears it. _Putting down the dog._ Like a lover’s lips, the words whisper against his ear, inside his head, and he waits until the man’s death twitches cease before turning to look at Sherlock.

Sherlock’s face is calm. He gazes at John like a man gazes into a mirror, without surprise or lack of recognition. “Don’t forget about the powder burns,” he says and nudges the body toward the dumpster with a booted foot. 

John scrubs at his knuckles and the grooves of his fingers with single-minded clarity, listening to the rain as it begins to fall, to Sherlock hoisting the dead man into the skip, to the mantra echoing in his head. 

Something is changing within him. Before Sherlock, John thinks he might have been concerned. Alarmed, even. 

Now, with Sherlock’s eyes burning into the back of his skull, John feels celestial.

* * *

The suspect isn’t dangerous. He’s just a slight, shaky man, but he moves in strange, nervous ways, setting John on edge. Every time the man paces, his footsteps a dull pattern to Sherlock’s rising deductions, John tenses. The gun burns at the small of his back, and he flexes his fingers restlessly at his sides. He tries to quell the sensation by folding his arms tightly over his chest, but it doesn’t help, and it doesn’t stop. John clenches his teeth, and the gun sears a brand against his skin.

Sherlock outlines the man’s crimes in a feverish voice, his eyes alight with glimmering, spiralling obsession. He’s in it now, the thrill of the chase, the euphoria of the climax, the summation of his tireless, exhausting work. He is aglow, set afire with his own internal inferno. 

John thinks he has never looked more perfect. It takes his teeth pressing into his lip, drawing blood, to resist the urge to prostrate himself before the wild, untamed beauty contained in the man before him.

Their suspect spins on his heel, and John shoots him through the chest. He folds like a house of cards. The blood spray is like a Rorschach inkblot test, a ruby and scarlet aura, a gossamer halo of fine, scattered ichor over the floor. 

John stares, seeing nebulas in the pattern of death and tasting divinity on his tongue.

When Sherlock turns toward him, the light in his eyes burns brighter, blazes, consumes the sanity that lingers in the edges of his quivering lips. “John,” he sighs. Nothing more. They don’t need words here, not when they are reflections of one another. 

They dump the body in the Thames, and John tangles his fingers in Sherlock’s curls with brief exaltation. 

Sherlock allows it, his smile a slash of white. In the dark, it reminds John of the sharp edge of a blade.

* * *

Their quarry is cornered. Trapped in the dark corner of some old, abandoned warehouse. Bats and unseen creatures lurk in the ceiling, lost to the black, and the man turns to face them. Sherlock’s breathing is loud, mingling with John’s, their lungs aching after the chase, the adrenaline feeding their risky high.

This time, it’s a mountain-like brute of a man, a dog if ever there was one. He’s pallid and sweaty, fingers clenched around brass knuckles. He takes a threatening step forward, and Sherlock meets him with his upper lip pulled back. His face shifts, corrupted by the drag of shadows over sharp features. The two men lock together, fighting for the upper hand. Blood spurts from the man’s nose, dribbling down his chin. An elbow catches Sherlock in the jaw, bringing him to his knees with a click of teeth. 

John surges forward before the man can take his advantage. The brass knuckles taste his skin, a cold, metal kiss that spills blood over John’s right eye. He’s blind, but he aims with instinct, and the gun flashes, once, twice, thrice. 

The bullets find their home in the man’s stomach, his thigh, his ribcage. 

After John picks Sherlock up off the ground, they meticulously dig the bullets out of the man’s body. Sherlock pockets the evidence, his fingers lingering on the striations ground into the metal by the firing pin in John’s gun. The dead man’s blood coats their fingers and knuckles, the delicate dip between the heel of their palms and the creases of their wrists.

Sherlock’s eyes are glimmering pinpoints in the dark, twin coins catching the faintest hint of light. He is nirvana, John’s salvation, the promised land bound by pale skin and sacrilege. John can’t help but want him, and he wants with the force and persistence of a star gone dark, the aftermath of a supernova eruption. 

In the corner of that empty building, the skeletal steel rafters lost in darkness, John backs Sherlock up against a wall. John makes him writhe and gasp, the two of them smeared with a stranger’s blood. 

John paints red over Sherlock’s arching body, gripping his white thighs where they cling to his waist. He burrows his lips and teeth against the hollow of Sherlock’s neck, and he whispers his devotion as Sherlock pants and spills over John’s stomach.

In the kitchen at Baker Street, Sherlock sutures the cut closed over John’s eye, and, afterward, he drops into John’s lap, straddles his thighs. They come apart amidst the stench of glory and antiseptic. They mingle until each smells like the other, skin raked and scored with dried blood, the marks of nails.

Their first kiss, underlined in red, tastes like metal in John’s mouth.

* * *

Next time, John doesn’t even use the gun. 

Sherlock is stuck for days, spinning his wheels endlessly on a murder case. Their suspect, a banker with his hands no doubt red with the crime, dodges every attempt to pin him to the kill. 

The break comes after midnight, Sherlock whipped into a frenzy by his certainty. 

“It fits, John,” he hisses, digging his fingers against John’s scarred shoulder. “He did it, he did it, I know he did it.”

The night is ticking ever closer to 1 am, and John soothes his madman with the promise of action. “I know, Sherlock. I’ll take care of it.”

“Help me,” Sherlock demands this of him, asking John to make the puzzle fit, to make the pieces match despite their rough edges.

“Anything,” John vows. 

They break into the man’s house. John pulls the dazed killer from his own bed, shoving him into a chair set in the middle of a cold, pristine kitchen. 

Sherlock paces while John works, the detective’s eyes wide with feverish faith.

The banker is ranting, raving, surging out of his chair and dropping back down like a clockwork machine. He calls Sherlock a freak, an aberration, something wrong and broken and sickening. 

Sherlock glances at the counter in John’s line of sight, a long, considering look at the knife block set on the granite. Idly, he blinks toward John and turns back to the man, who calls him a homophobic slur, and an idiot.

It’s two quick strides to the counter, another four to the man when John guts him like a fish. Easier than making tea in the morning, less messy than cleaning up after a car crash. Red washes over his hands, up to his elbows, the scent of the man’s fear first filling John’s senses, then dying away with a death rattle.

Afterwards, John trashes the dead man’s flat, while Sherlock wipes their fingerprints from the broken lock and the blood-spattered carving knife. 

“Why?” Sherlock asks when they’re tangled in one another back at Baker Street. Cupping the curve of Sherlock’s flank, pulling one long, trembling leg over his shoulder, John shrugs. 

“Because you asked me to.”

* * *

Sherlock is furious. His eyes are fixed and filled with rage, his hands curled into empty claws at his sides. “The lack of evidence doesn’t _matter_ , Lestrade. I _know_ he did it.” 

“Your intuition isn’t enough to hold him, Sherlock. And you know that.” Greg’s voice is rough, scraped raw from repeating himself. “I have to cut him loose, I’m sorry.”

“You will be,” Sherlock spits, spinning away in a flurry of anger and overwhelming vitriol. “When he kills someone else’s child, you’ll know I was right.” He sneers, tossing hate over his shoulder, “Maybe it’ll be one of yours, and then you’ll beg me to take care of it for you.” 

He stalks away, John following in his wake like something caught and propelled by the east wind. 

_“Justice,”_ Sherlock grits out, clawing at the back of John’s hand when their fingers brush. “What a joke.” 

John flicks the collar of his jacket up against the cold, reaching out to do the same for Sherlock with blood running down his wrist. Sherlock turns his head to catch John’s fingers in his teeth, his eyes like thunder and fire. An entire forest set alight by one errant lightning strike. 

They stare at one another, a flash of silent communication passing between them, and John nods. Sherlock’s smile is angelic, wide and tinted red.

“I love you,” Sherlock tells him, his lips rouged with John’s blood. John wipes the smeared colour into the flesh with his thumb.

“I know.” 

When night falls, John stalks his prey from New Scotland Yard into the dark, twisted streets of London. The shadows embrace him like a lover, the way Sherlock will wrap himself around John’s gore-splattered body when he returns home. 

The man’s neck breaks like a brittle branch, and John leaves him in the street without his eyes. Sherlock will like those for his next experiment, and the blood leaves a patina on his hands that John hopes to recreate on Sherlock’s skin.

Sherlock won’t touch the murder, no matter how Greg pleads and begs. The death is ruled a cold case after the man’s house is searched, and photos of his other young, missing victims are exposed. 

Sherlock rides John on the sofa that night, his back to the tv as the story plays out over the news, the screen flickering blue over his bare shoulders and bent spine. John drifts his fingertips along the rough trail of his vertebra and thinks of immortality.

* * *

Sherlock’s tongue drags over his neck, tasting John’s sweat, his adrenaline, the lingering edge of death and danger and destruction on his skin.

“How far would you go?” he asks, musing, humming at the stretch of John inside his body. “For me, how far would you go?”

John spreads him over the sheets, leaving the mark of his teeth on Sherlock’s pretty, pale skin. “Is there a limit?” His nails linger, moving red and ragged down Sherlock’s chest, drawing blood and a breathless sigh from parted lips. “Or would you ask for all of me?”

“All of it, I want all of you,” Sherlock snarls, digging at John’s shoulders with greedy hands. “Would you do that for me, John? Would you give me everything, every singular thing that makes you human?”

His hand on Sherlock’s throat, John feels the rush of life beneath his fingers, beating under fragile skin. This is chemical, imperfect biology at work, a flood of sentience and survival, fight or flight. Here, pulsing under his fingertips, is Sherlock’s love for him. His devotion, the thud of John held within every beat of Sherlock’s captive heart. 

“I would,” he says, and applies pressure, just enough to make Sherlock’s face twitch. Instead of fear, John sees adoration. He wonders if Sherlock would struggle if he were to push a little harder, if John choked the air from his lungs. Would he just lie there? Would he let it happen, staying still and watching John with that same look of unadulterated adulation?

John thinks he would.

“I’d crawl inside of you if I could,” Sherlock whispers. He whimpers as John tangles a hand in his hair, tugs and thrusts deeper.

“I know.” Smiling, John shoves his thumb between Sherlock’s lips, pressing on his tongue. “I’d let you.”

**Author's Note:**

> If your comment is just that John seems small/soft/whatever or that Sherlock is much darker/sexier/whatever, please move long.


End file.
